The Loneliest Spot: What No One Tells You About Leadership

Forbes

5 hours ago

Alla Adam, Investor | 3X Founder | Negotiator | Mentor | Pilot | Author at Adam Impact Institute.
Kiran called from JFK. Her voice was steady, but the background noise betrayed the tension—'Final boarding call for El Al Flight 008 to Tel Aviv,' I heard through the speaker.
'Thought I'd catch you before I board,' she said. 'Greg insisted I talk to you. And, you know, one can't ignore Greg's recommendations. So, I know what I'm doing. Mostly. But something's off. I've got the numbers. I've got the traction. I've got the story. But I don't know if I trust myself as a leader right now.'
She was on her way to pitch a prospective Series A investor. Her rapidly growing techbio startup had just crossed $7 million ARR. Everyone said she was a genius. But she wasn't calling for strategy advice. She was calling to make sure she wasn't losing herself in the performance. A fellow founder had told her, 'Talk to Alla. Before this leadership rush swallows you whole.'
She was scaling hard—lean team, relentless momentum. 'If you're not small, nimble and fast, you're toast,' she'd once posted on LinkedIn. 'The days when hypergrowth scaling meant hiring frenzies are over.' She wasn't wrong. Startups now break $100 million+ in revenue with fewer than 100 people.
But leadership at that level isn't a performance metric. It's an emotional tax. And Kiran was starting to feel the cost.
The Job No One Applies For
Let's be clear: Most people don't actually want to lead. They want the movie version of leadership—speeches, IPO bells, headlines. But real leadership is something else entirely. It means making decisions with incomplete information. It means breaking things that people love. It means being judged for outcomes no one else understands. And it means doing all of it while maintaining a steady voice on the investor call.
When it works, you get a sense of agency. You get to own the outcome. But it rarely feels good. In fact, it often feels like an exercise in hopelessness.
You Will Disappoint People—You Have To
Here's what they don't tell you in founder school: You will let people down. You will make calls that cost people jobs. You will be misunderstood—sometimes for months, sometimes forever. You will not get to explain yourself to everyone. And you shouldn't.
Your job is to hold the line between what feels good and what keeps the company alive. Why? Because leadership isn't consensus; it's discernment. The moment you start trying to justify every decision, you're already playing defense.
When in doubt, keep your distance.
Reputation Is The Wrong Metric ... Until It Isn't
Founders love to chase performance metrics: burn, runway, CAC, LTV. But leadership is cumulative. It's judged retroactively, and often unfairly. You are only as good as your last performance—until someone decides you're not.
And when that day comes, you won't get to flood the room with footnotes. Your reputation will rest on every micro-moment that came before: the way you onboarded people, the tone of your 1-on-1s, the clarity of your road map, the proactiveness and strong boundaries during board meetings, the times you said "no" when everyone else nodded.
That bucket fills—or empties—quietly. And often, you won't see the tipping point coming—not in Slack threads, not in board decks, not even in the people who stop making eye contact. By the time your reputation is questioned, your defense will look like PR, not truth. And once the leak begins, it's already too late to patch.
Build Systems That Outlive The Performance
So, what do you do?
You build slower than the hype suggests. You install clarity where others install charm. You let your principles speak louder than your pitch. You don't pull people to the top with you; you ensure they are the right people who genuinely want to be at the top alongside you. You make peace with being misunderstood by those who were never meant to understand you.
Start building systems by codifying how decisions get made in your company: Turn patterns into frameworks. Replace gut calls and unspoken rules with visible operating principles. Run weekly decision reviews so team leaders don't need your blessing—they need a clear, consistent rubric. And ensure that feedback, performance and priorities are written, available to and editable by all. That's how systems hold when you're not in the room.
Great systems also protect others from your worst days—and teach them to lead without inheriting your burnout. And remember: Every leader you admire has sat in the loneliest spot imaginable—at the exact moment they had the most eyes on them.
Back To Kiran
The gate agent announced the final call. Kiran (whose name has been changed for confidentiality) hesitated, then said, 'You know what scares me most? It's not the raise. It's that I know I'll get it. And then I'll have to keep performing. I'm afraid I'm disappearing inside this.'
She wasn't burned out. She was over-leadered. But she was also waking up.
Before we hung up, I told her something I've learned the hard way: Leadership doesn't always feel like clarity or happiness or joy. More often, it feels like doubt, well-directed.
She boarded the flight—not calmer, but clearer. What we kept circling back to was this: The higher you rise, the less applause you get for doing the hard, right thing. But you still have to do it.
That loneliest spot? That's where leadership lives.
The Loneliest Spot
More leadership equals more weight, more uncertainty and more discomfort, not more happiness or joy. It demands discernment over popularity, systems over spotlight and the courage to do the right thing long after it stops feeling rewarding.
It will cost you comfort, certainty and sometimes your likability. But it buys you something rarer: the right to stay in integrity when the room turns quiet. When the storm hits and all eyes are on you—not for inspiration, but for direction—your job isn't to be liked. It's to be a leader.
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